1 is the closest to the status quo.

2 seems safe, but I don't love the toolbar-style buttons floating in the middle like that.

Leaning toward 3 myself, but it's pretty different from the status quo.

Do you have a clear preference?

Everyone loves this one! I did, too, as a screenshot. But I build and use all of my designs to test them. This one’s downsides:

- It confuses the sheet-presentation metaphor

- When swiped to the show notes, it creates 3 levels of card depth, which is cluttered and doesn't fit the 26 design

- It needs a lot of vertical padding, which pushes the playback controls quite far down

This is why I build and live with my designs. I wouldn't find these tradeoffs in mockups or screenshots alone.

I've been using this design today. I think it looks great in screenshots, and improves a lot of those issues, especially in show-notes view (which lets the content scroll under the glass ad capsule).

In practice, though, it has a fatal flaw:

It always looks like I have a notification. And that's very distracting when it's sitting on a counter as I do stuff and I see it out of the corner of my eye.

Which I never would’ve realized until I lived with it on my phone for half a day.

Trying this variant for the second half of the day. It's less notificationey.

(I tried a border around the ad, but that doesn't fit 26's style and immediately looks old in context with the rest of the OS. And the low contrast between the backgrounds is, in this case, actually an upside — it makes it look less like a notification. I'm about 75% satisfied with this.)